The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Rock & Roll Is Now ‘Rape Culture’

Posted on | October 16, 2016 | Comments Off on Rock & Roll Is Now ‘Rape Culture’

 

A few years ago, I saw a story (I could find a link, but don’t want to bother right now) about how groups like Led Zeppelin more or less habitually had sex with teenage groupies back in the 1970s. Given the rock-n-roll outlaw attitude — a cultural leftover of the Sexual Revolution back in hippie days, “the Summer of Love” and all that — no one could dispute that many teenage girls were eager to say they had been with Jimmy Page or whatever other rock icon they could get backstage to meet.

Flash-forward to the 21st century, when most Baby Boomers like me are already grandparents, and our hindsight reflection on that era of drugs, sex and rock-and-roll is blurred by more than the after-effects of whatever hallucinogenic substances we ingested back in the day. There are feminists who would tell you that all those rock icons were sexual predators, and that all those teenage groupies were victims.

Whatever. Feminists now agree with every fundamentalist tent-revival preacher that rock-and-roll is evil, and it is a well-known fact that Jimmy Page sold his soul to Satan and — let’s just get right down to it, OK? — America has been going straight to Hell ever since Elvis Presley started singing that Wicked Negro Devil Music, inciting girls to ungodly carnal lust with all those savage jungle voodoo rhythms and gyrating dances.

So it seems 21st-century feminism has brought us full circle to Eisenhower-era prudery, except everybody’s gay now, and heterosexuality is now the dreaded menace to America’s Youth. Such were the thoughts that inspired my most recent Medium essay:

Talia Borodin, now 37, has decided that an incident that occurred when she was 20 was rape. Far be it from me to dispute her right to tell her own story, and to share her own beliefs. What troubles me about her story, and about the current feminist “rape culture” discourse in general, is that it essentially exempts women from responsibility for their own sexual behavior.
Ms. Borodin describes a situation in which she was alone with a “cute boy” and they “fool around.” He was wearing only boxer shorts, and Ms. Borodin was evidently naked. Despite her insistence — she “vocalized it many times” — that she only wanted to “fool around,” he attempted to have sexual intercourse with her. She yelled at him to stop and he stopped.
The question is what we are supposed to learn from Ms. Borodin’s story. What is the didactic purpose? And this is a question that applies to feminist “rape culture” discourse in general. Is the purpose (a) to help prevent rape, or (b) to demonize heterosexual males, per se? . . .

Please read the whole thing, and if this makes me an accessory to “rape culture,” you can blame it on those savage jungle voodoo rhythms.




 


Category: Sex Trouble

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